The Perfect Tweet: So What If It Fits?

Use an economy of words. Writing instructors love this advice. It’s staple wisdom for writers. Yet if you’re inclined toward rambling, it probably makes you bristle.

If you think it’s a challenge to say more with fewer words, how do you like limited characters? Hello, Twitter! Trying to cram a thought into 140 characters can feel like trying to cram your fist into your nose. It might take you ten times as long to express an idea that isn’t even that complicated. And even then you might end up with something like the first paragraph of this blog, which has precisely 140 characters—and not room for so much as a hashtag. Guess what? Said paragraph is not how you write a Tweet. Sure, it fits the character limit, is grammatically sound, and makes a point, but in the world of Twitter, none of that is the essential matter.

Twitter was never designed around the literary concept of economy of words. It was designed around the standard character-limit of a single SMS message, 160, and meant to leave enough room for a user name and such. It’s no more meant for quality writing than Morse code is. So, if you’re a poet, have fun bending Twitter to your literary will (many poets do), but if you’re a business owner, cast literary caution to the wind and recognize that the perfect tweet doesn’t take a literary genius. It requires a social-media marketing one.

We work to get followers to do something with your Tweets, not just read them. To that end, we discern not just what to tweet about but also when to tweet it. We grasp the power of the carefully selected retweet, who to follow, follow-backs, and how to handle replies to tweets, especially contentious ones. We also give your business plenty of good, fresh stuff to tweet about by generating original content for you on other social media platforms, such as blogs.

Forget about economy of words. Where economy of charactersrules the day, it’s not about saying more with less. It’s about generating more with less—more buzz, more clicks, more favorites, more re-tweets. It’s not about crafting neat copy. It’s about crafting real action.